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But there have been several cases of humans surviving extreme cold, lending support to the idea that hibernation could be induced with drugs.

Around 50 per cent of cancer patients have an advanced form of the disease. In many cases it has spread around the body from the original tumour, a process known as metastasis.

‘You cannot use surgery everywhere to remove the cancer or do radiation in all the affected parts of the body or you will kill the patient’, Dr Durante told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Boston.

‘But if you could put the patient into synthetic torpor you could stop the cancer growing. It gives you more time.

‘You also increase radio-resistance. So you can treat all the different metastases without killing the patient.

‘You wake up the patients and they are cured.’

This would allow doctors more time to treat tumours – especially when they have spread around the body. It would also make treatment more effective, as inactive tissues respond better to radiotherapy (file photo)

The process has not been attempted in humans. But in 2013 rats, who do not naturally hibernate, were successfully placed into a ‘synthetic torpor’, which saw their body processes slow to a near standstill.

Dr Durante said: ‘We can induce synthetic torpor in rats. You can reduce the body temperature down to 13-14C (55-57F).

‘The animals are still alive. We wake it up and it’s still fine.

He said he expected that within five to ten years the approach could begin to be used in people.

‘Now it is understood how it works, I’m confident we will be able to develop drugs that can induce this torpor,’ he said.

‘Then we would lower body temperature to 13 to 15C (57F). Humans can resist these conditions for a surprisingly long time. There have been examples of people lost in the snow.

‘We are aiming for at least one week. It gives us time to deliver all the treatments that are needed to make the person cancer free.’

Last night Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK, said: ‘The effects of a technique like induced hibernation on cancers are hard to predict: they might help or hinder the treatments we use.

‘We will need to see some careful experiments in laboratory models before we can say whether this would be safe or effective for people.’